American novelist Tayari Jones is this year’s recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She’s being recognized for “An American Marriage,” described by chair of judges Kate Williams as a book that “shines a light on today’s America,” per The Guardian.
The prestigious honor celebrates the best novel of the year written in English by a female author and includes a £30,000 award, amounting to roughly $40,000 USD.
“An American Marriage” tells the story of Atlanta-based newlyweds Celestial and Roy. The couple’s lives are forever changed when the latter is sentenced to 12 years in jail for a rape he didn’t commit.
Chosen from a six-book shortlist that included Anna Burns’ “Milkman” and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “My Sister, The Serial Killer,” “An American Marriage” counts Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama among its fans.
“It’s an incredible examination of America and American life, focusing on the intimacy of a marriage but on a huge political canvas,” said Williams. “The prose is luminous, striking, and utterly moving. How hard it is even when you’re on the outside and are free, how you’re not really free when you have someone in prison.”
Jones emphasized that she’s “thrilled and honored” to receive the prize. She described incarceration as the “boogeyman of black America. I decided to look under the bed and tackle it head on,” she explained, before taking a jab at Trump. “I’m delighted that Obama read my book and I’m delighted that I had a president in my time that read books and recommended them, who cared about the past and history, who used it to guide us to the future. I have no real hope or desire that the current occupant of the White House will read my book.”
Also a creative writing professor, Jones was inspired to pen “An American Marriage” after overhearing a couple arguing at the mall.
British Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie claimed last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for “Home Fire,” a story about three orphaned siblings loosely inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone.”
Check out a clip of Jones discussing “An American Marriage” — and the fateful trip to the mall that led to the novel — on “CBS This Morning” below.
